Point-of sale (POS) is the location where a transaction takes place. It also refers to the immediate capture of transactions and customer payment information when goods and services are purchased. This data can be obtained using many different devices such as a computer, cash register, barcode scanner, PIN pads, and magnetic card readers.

E-Learning has many benefits over traditional methods of learning. It enables individuals to study when it would otherwise not be practical. For example, a student may live in a remote location and be unable to relocate e.g. because of family commitments. It also allows the tuition to be self-paced or instructor-led, and is often more economical than traditional methods.

As a computer user, you will no doubt have numerous passwords to remember. Some sites put restrictions on the choice of the password. For example, a site may insist on a minimum number of characters, capital letters, numerals, and other characters which make choosing the same password for each site to be impossible. More importantly, there are good security reasons not to duplicate passwords. This inevitably means that individuals will simply have too many passwords to remember. One solution is to keep the passwords in written form. However, this is also highly insecure.

We have extolled the virtues of open source software in many of our previous articles. The debate between open source and closed source software has often centered on factors such as freedom, reliability, interoperability and open standards, support, and philosophy.

In the days when Linux was a fledgling operating system, font handling was often identified as a major weakness. Fortunately, the situation is considerably better these days, with a better quality of user interface typography.

Many readers will have witnessed their computer system becoming progressively slower in use over time. This particularly affects Windows so much so that over time it can feel like the machine is running at half speed. This is in part due to users continually installing more applications, and not performing system maintenance.

Twitter has seen an extraordinary increase in the number of tweets, brief posts of 140 characters. That's right, an absurd constraint, with no pictures, video, or audio. Nevertheless, these short messages seems to bring out the best in humour, understanding, and observation, with tweets often sticking to the facts. 25 billion tweets were made in the past year alone using this text message service by over 100 million people around the world!

Linux is vastly underrated as a gaming platform. This may be due to the fact that there is no significant marketing of Linux games. With a lack of big-name games featuring in the computing press, coupled with a low market share for Linux on desktop PCs, things might seem bleak, with major barriers to the growth of Linux games.

We have always been strong advocates of computer games. Rather than rotting the brain, computer games are interactive, teach essential life skills, and can stimulate learning. They also have been proven to enhance skills such as creativity, cooperation, teamplay, as well as encouraging innovative and strategic thinking and improving hand-eye coordination.